Review by Choice Review
In this ambitious and mostly successful attempt to move the discussion of Romantic literature in a new direction (a direction anticipated by recent developments in cultural criticism), Hoagwood (Texas A&M Univ.) argues that even recent revisionary criticism persists in believing the myth that the "meaning" of a work resides primarily in the mental ideas that critics assume the author "intended." Hoagwood ranges over familiar and unfamiliar works--the poetry of Wordsworth, Blake, and Byron; the novels of Mary Hays; the poetry of Samuel Rogers and Charlotte Smith--to establish two points: that the physical details of book publication are as crucial as authorial intention in establishing meaning; and that interpretations of the first generation of Romantics as apostates in their mature years to their earlier faith in the French Revolution fail to see that conservatives and radicals alike used the same techniques of metaphorical displacement in treating political topics from the 1790s to the 1820s. The author builds on and revises the work of such critics as Jerome McGann (The Romantic Ideology, CH, Nov'83), David Simpson (Wordsworth's Historical Imagination, CH, Dec'87), and Tilottama Rajan (The Supplement of Reading, 1990). Although he is at times content to state that a new meaning has emerged when he should also be explaining what that meaning is, Hoagwood's arguments are at the cutting edge of current Romantic criticism. Extensive notes and bibliography help make this a book that all academic libraries keeping up on recent Romantic criticism will want to purchase. M. Minor Morehead State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
